The outside world...

I'm going to do a series of blog posts on using FTDI devices to access the outside world. There are probably a dozen other similar series out there, so I hope I can introduce enough novelty to make it interesting

I've been interested in low-level programming for as long as I've been programming (anyone else remember this book? - yes, a "children's" book on Machine Code...)

In terms of 'physical computing', things like Arduino are really taking off at the moment, but I'm going to take a step back to the simplicity of simple digital IO based on the BitBang mode of FTDI's latest devices.  There are two reasons for this: firstly it came seem laborious writing two sets of software (for both the host computer and the target micro-controller), and secondly that even if the eventual application is going to be a standalone micro based system, it is still generally quicker to prototype things using only the host computer, avoiding the cross-compile and firmware upload cycle.

Hardware-wise, I'm using a FTDI UM232R (Farnell link) device.  (I've also used one of these, and this either will be usable) This is a DIL module which plugs nicely into a breadboard which can be used to interface with stuff.  If you want to follow along, get a breadboard to plug it into, some LEDs, 1Kohm resistors, and some connecting wire (I like these, but they are waaay over priced).  In a couple of posts I'll be using one of these (N26AZ), too...

On the software side, I'm using Linux on a EEEPC 701 (stock Xandros) with the libftdi drivers, compiled from source found here.  The FTDI supplied drivers are similar and might be a better choice on Windows (not sure if libftdi works on Windows), but some of the function names and interfaces differ somewhat.

First step is getting the simple.c program compiled and working.  The program outline - slightly edited for length - looks something like this.

/* see http://www.intra2net.com/en/developer/libftdi/documentation/ */ 
#include "stdio.h"
#include "ftdi.h"

int main(void)
{
    int ret;
    struct ftdi_context ftdic;
    if (ftdi_init(&ftdic) < 0) {
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    if ((ret = ftdi_usb_open(&ftdic, 0x0403, 0x6001)) < 0) {
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    /* DO STUFF HERE */

    if ((ret = ftdi_usb_close(&ftdic)) < 0) {
        return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }

    ftdi_deinit(&ftdic);

    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Compiling this (gcc -o simple simple.c -lftdi) and running the resulting executable should not cause any errors, and should return a successful error code if a FTDI device is attached.

This post is getting long enough for now, so I'll leave it at that. Next time will be configuring bitbang mode, where we can use the device as a configurable 8-bit IO port, blinking lights, and the wonders of Python's ctypes module...